dmd support for IDEs + network GUI (OT)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"David Gileadi" <foo at bar.com> wrote in message 
news:hb24km$pm8$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Video game developers don't make multiplayer games by sending a 
>> compressed video stream of the fully-rendered frame - they know that 
>> would be unusable. Instead, they just send the minimum higher-level 
>> information that's actually needed, like "PlayerA changed direction 72 
>> degrees" (over-simplification, of course). And they send it to a client 
>> that'll never insist on crap like interpreted JS or 
>> open-for-interpretation standards. And when there's a technology that's 
>> inadequate for their needs, like TCP, they make a proper replacement 
>> instead of hacking in a half-assed "solution" on top of the offender, 
>> TCP. And it works great even though those programs have visuals that are 
>> *far* more complex than a typical GUI app. So why can't a windowing 
>> toolkit be extended to do the same? And do so *without* building it on 
>> top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax, 
>> etc.?
>
> This is generally true, although see OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/).  I 
> hear it works better than you'd expect, but don't have much interest in 
> actually trying it.

Yea, I've heard of that. I'm extremely skeptical though. Even at *absolute* 
best, I still can't imagine it having less lag than one of those laggy 
HDTVs, which I already consider entirely inadequate for gaming. Plus they'd 
essentially have to have a whole high-end gaming rig (plus all the 
higher-end-than-usual video-capture/compression and network needs) for each 
simultaneous user, which I'd imagine would either make the subscription fee 
absurdly high, lead to 90's-AOL-style too-many-connection issues, or send 
them right into bankruptcy. It's just unnecessary bandwidth/latency bloat.